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What is Bach Viet’s '百粤' origin? What is the relationship of Vietnamese and Bach Viet?

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Bách Việt . The Baiyue (Chinese: 百越), Hundred Yue, or simply Yue, were various ethnic groups who inhabited the regions of South China and Northern Vietnam during the 1st millennium BC and 1st millennium AD.

The relation between Vietnamese and Bach Viet

Ethnic group Kinh Vietnamese honored two of the ancient tribes that were also grouped into the Viet category, and thus, the relation between them is: some portion (2 tribes) of Bach Viet is being honored to be the legendary ancestry to Kinh Vietnamese; similar to the Chinese honoring Hua Xia tribe(a union tribe conjoined with various tribes) to be their legendary ancestry. But in terms of biologic connection with the Bach Viet, Kinh Vietnamese is not a homogenous isolationist group that solely descent from that two tribes of the Bach Viet, and for those who would like to tag a specific set of chromosome to name it as “Viet DNA”, then conduct who among the Vietnamese is pure Viet, or MORE viet than another, they are of a Nazi fashion.

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Baiyue were hundred of unknown tribes that had inhabited the coastline of present-day Southern China during the Zhou dynasty. The Baiyue of Ancient Southern China and the Vietnamese do indeed NOT relate historically and language, though both bear the same name “Yue” in Chinese.

The Vietnamese were descended from the native Vietic tribes of north-central Vietnam and Laos, around the sixth to the ninth century.

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Baiyue (Bách Việt) was the term the Chinese used in ancient times to refer to various ethnic tribes who populated Southern China. Yue 越 was a collective name made up by the Chinese for these peoples, whom the Chinese also unflatteringly called Nanman or Southern Barbarians. Bai meant “many” rather than there were numerically one hundred such tribes.

Various Yue peoples were recorded in Hanshu (Hán Thư) such as Yuyue (Ư Việt) – present day Zhejiang, Shanghai and Jiangsu; Minyue (Mân Việt) – present day Fujian; Dongou (Đông Âu) – present day Wenzhou and Taizhou; Dianyue (Điền Việt) – present day Yunan; Ouyue (Âu Việt) – present day northernmost Vietnam, western Guangdong, and northern Guangxi; Louyue (Lạc Việt) – present day North Vietnam, etc.

Wu (Ngô) and Yue (Việt) were the two Yue kingdoms well known in the Warring States Period. They were constantly at each other’s throats, culminating in the deadly and dramatic struggles between Wu Fuchai (Ngô Phù Sai) and Yue Goujian (Việt Câu Tiễn).

Nanyue (Nam Việt) was a kingdom established by Zhao Tuo (Triệu Đà), a Qin general, encompassing present-day Guangdong, Guangxi and North Vietnam. For declaring himself Nanyue Emperor, Zhao Tou was reprimanded by the Han emissary Lu Jia as a usurper.

Zhao Tuo defended himself as such: “The southern land is humid; its people are barbaric and idle. In the East, Minyue has only a few thousand people and yet declare themselves king. In the West, Oulou (Âu Lạc) with naked people still call themselves king. This old official appropriates emperor title just for his own amusement. He dare not let it be heard through to His Majesty” (Sima Qian’s Shiji - Nanyue Liezhuan. Sử Ký Tư Mã Thiên – Nam Việt Liệt Truyện).

Oulou (Âu Lạc), a merge of Ouyue (Âu Việt) and Louyue (Lạc Việt), was an ancient Vietnamese kingdom before being annexed into Nanyue by Zhao Tuo. The question is, was there any relationship between ancient Vietnamese and other Baiyue peoples. My answer is, there was no historical, ethnic, linguistic and cultural relationship at all between ancient Vietnam and Baiyue, except for the Yue/Việt namesake. Below are the reasons:

(1) Yue is a generic name the ancient Chinese used to call all the tribes living in the South beyond the Chinese realm (as a homonym, Yue also means “to go beyond”). There were hundreds of tribes spreading all the way from Yangtze River to Red River. There was no such a thing as a single Yue entity. As to Yue culture, except for established kingdoms such as Wu and Yue that had been sinicised, although they might have reached certain levels of social organisation and settlement, most Yue peoples were essentially tribal

(2) The Vietnamese language belongs to Vietic, a branch of the Austroasiatic/Mon-Khmer language family ( Austroasiatic languages - Wikipedia and Vietic languages - Wikipedia ). Whereas most likely, ancient Yue peoples living from south of Yangtze river to Guangxi spoke various Tai-Kadai languages before sinicisation. The Yue remnants in Southern China speak Tai-Kadai. None of them speak Mon-Khmer ( Kra–Dai languages - Wikipedia )

(3) The Louyue (Lạc Việt) culture was identified with Bronze drums (Trống Đồng) of the Đông Sơn culture ( Dong Son drum - Wikipedia ). Bronze drums are not found north of Guangxi and Guangdong (except in odd cases which may be attributed to trading connections).

Although disputed by historians, a myth has been perpetuated that Vietnamese are descendants of Baiyue peoples originated from south of Yangtze. It’s even pushed to such an absurdity in claiming that the Baiyue culture was “stolen” by the Chinese!

I shake my head every time, out of curiosity, reading books of fake researchers promoting this kind of misleading narrative to people, relying on weird theories and interpretations without any historical, linguistic and archaeological evidence whatsoever. It sadly reflects a deep inferiority complex in some Vietnamese. Believing in such a myth is essentially an antithesis to the Vietnamese pride; a pride that as a people, Vietnamese believe in their own strength, their aspirations, their bravery, their tenacity and their resiliency, without clinging onto an odd myth about an ancient time at some place somewhere in another country.

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China . is something large, the Chinese communist party, or the ruling dynasties in the mainland or Beijing always want to invade Vietnam. I give you an example of a dynasty that ruled China, you know that China has many autonomous regions, each with its own language and script. When the Chinese army invaded Vietnam in 1979, because the army commanders could not communicate easily, due to different languages, they used trumpets to signal, so it was difficult to order the teams to act. That explains in 2 weeks China invaded Vietnam with 600,000 troops but lost more than 50,000 troops

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What is Bach Viet?

“Viet” or “越/粤” is just an ancient Chinese label that refer to the people of the South to Yangtz river, it doesn’t serve a meaning in the sense of disposition, just as room number 202, the “202” itself doesn’t serve a descriptive purpose.

And the particular script 粤 in now a day is strictly limited to be a noun that refers to only the Kwangtung region. As per Bach, it is literally hundred, but stands for the sense of “many”, NOT in the numerical sense of a countable 100.

About whether or not the word Viet itself has an etymologic root, a theory is the following: as per another Chinese script for Viet, which is “越”, it is originated from a more ancient form of script which is 戉, and it referred to a tool like this :

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In other word, MAYBE, PERHPAS, the ancient Chinese saw those tribal people in the South to Yangtze using this stuff, and then they just named the people after it; this is normal, I did the same to them as well, “chopstickmen”.

The relation between Vietnamese and Bach Viet

Ethnic group Kinh Vietnamese honored two of the ancient tribes that were also grouped into the Viet category, and thus, the relation between them is: some portion (2 tribes) of Bach Viet is being honored to be the legendary ancestry to Kinh Vietnamese; similar to the Chinese honoring Hua Xia tribe(a union tribe conjoined with various tribes) to be their legendary ancestry. But in terms of biologic connection with the Bach Viet, Kinh Vietnamese is not a homogenous isolationist group that solely descent from that two tribes of the Bach Viet, and for those who would like to tag a specific set of chromosome to name it as “Viet DNA”, then conduct who among the Vietnamese is pure Viet, or MORE viet than another, they are of a Nazi fashion.

EDIT : in the comment section, Anh Nguyen share some objectivistic information that suggest a different explanation , and I think his sharing is worthier than mine.

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